People seemed to like the idea when I pitched it. Can we pick a weekend to do it? Having at least 2 weeks notice would be good so people can clear time in schedules, read up on docs if they want, etc. Maybe weekend of February 15?

All you really need is a way to allow helpers to indicate they just helped someone – A message containing only “yw” or “You’re welcome” is a good candidate.

Then you parse the logs periodically for those, and as people reach a number of those, you do a check on each of their “yw”s manually, and confirm they actually did help someone – and give them the “prize”.

A “drive” is a special event that happens infrequently, and gets a big publicity push. That’s what I’m talking about. There’s no reason there couldn’t be a “weekend project” based on this that is active every weekend, but you would need to always have enough people staffing it. The minute someone tries to participate and there’s no one to review work and mentor, that’s the minute the program has failed.

As for having an ongoing “yw” system, that is kind of the opposite of the guided mentorship for new contributors that I’m talking about. What you’re talking about is more just stats gathering, which we already gather without having people enter “yw” on responses.

I didn’t say your suggestion “isn’t awesome,” it’s just not in line with the project/goals we’re talking about in this thread, as I stated before.

Ongoing support contribution isn’t a numbers game, so tying a prize system to regular contribution would incentivize people to answer more easy questions and skip over the harder ones that take more time so they could get more “yw”s on the board. We do look at the numbers of responses already, as mentioned, and the team reps and current moderators just plain notice when people start stepping more. The prize there is more responsibility and moderator status.

As I helped people this weekend I was trying to take note of how many confirmed “helps” I racked up and this is going to be a challenge to track and get 20. I kind of feel those ones that are going to go through and verify count the “helps” are going to spend more time doing that than anything.

Not quite sure how it is all going to play out yet and I don’t really have any solid ideas on how to do the tracking but the only reasonable idea I can think of is when a “helper” thinks they are worthy of receiving a “help” point they tag the thread with their name or a special keyword that everyone will use. Then when reviewed the tag gets removed.

But if something like that isn’t in place then the work for the mentors is going to be a bunch. Just an idea.

Since we’ve done contest things with contributors before (like GCI) there’s a pretty simple way to handle this. Each contestant makes a list of their thread URLs and that’s what gets submitted at the end for review/tally. During the weekend, the mentors are all about helping people get the right answers. Then we take a day to tally results. Mentors can be keeping a list of thread IDs as well as they are helping, and then can check them off as yes/no easily when doing the final tally. Process for grading is not going to be the burden here, it will be making sure we have people around to help with questions 24/7 for the contest time period, getting the word out, and having documentation in place that helps people get started.

Not directly related, but the post got me thinking about this. Overall, there’s no way for a volunteer to “ask for backup” when they’ve started answering a thread and either they’re not sure or it ends up being outside their comfort zone.

For the weekend, the mentor would be the new volunteer’s fallback, but outside of that weekend, should there be a way to do that? Either a tag, or an established practice of pinging someone in IRC, or something?

I e-mailed the listserv and seems there’s no practice short of saying I don’t know and hoping someone else checks on the thread.

Yes, setting up a contributor buddies/mentors program is on our list over in the /community group. Once the welcome wagon IRC channel staffing is done (hopefully this week) I think that’s one of the next projects.

Realistically, yes, the right answer is that if you have started helping someone and then you hit a dead end, it’s time to tag someone else in. The problem with using actual tags for this is that people figure out the system quickly and suddenly everyone is tagging their posts with the special team-assist tag in the hope of getting more immediate senior attention. Leaving a comment that says, “I don’t know the answer and have run out of ideas for what to try next,” is the best thing. Pinging the list to ask for an assist or hopping into #wordpress to see if anyone there can help is an option, too.

Today in IRC we discussed what tools might may supporting in the forums better. For those

We started with this scenario: You’ve written a theme or plugin.

How do you handle the forum posts today?

What do you wish was there that isn’t?

What annoys you about the forums the most?

The goal of this is to get an understanding of how you, as a person who supports your own work, uses the forums, and what pitfalls do you see.

From IRC:

Reply-by-email: You can already get emails of any new post in your plugin threads (Go to https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/PLUGINNAME and here’s a link for “Subscribe to Emails for this Plugin”), so what if plugin authors could email back?

“Warnings” – so if someone’s being bad, moderators (and plugin/theme devs in their support forums) can click +1 or -1 on their name and set a ‘mood.’ or warning level.

Plugin Version: A way to list plugin version (can be auto-populated from the broken form?)

Throttle: A button to ask for the 30-second block to be lifted. Or automatically do it based on time served/products released/general coolness.

More ‘Support Type’ options: This is a feature request, this is a support request, this is a you-suck.

Flag POST as spam: We can do topics, but not posts (or Flag Topic vs Modlook). Imagine emails to wp-forums “JerrySarcastic has flagged the following post as probably spam… {link}” This would have to be limited in usage though. I would say plugin/theme authors in their threads only.

For moderators in general we came up with these:

Better Profiles: If you click on the IP, you go to the backend of bbPress and see all posts by IP. It would be nice if we could do that with usernames too.

TacNuke: One click to delete all posts and ban the account (for spammers)

Warnings: I’ve tried this in another forum I admin and it was nothing but a recipe for disaster, complaints and general bad feelings. So much so that I was asked to remove it after about 12 weeks. I don’t see this working at all well on support forums where 5/10 posters are already bad tempered, upset or otherwise frustrated.

Plugin Version: That might be a nice addition.

Throttle: +1 for the button. Can general coolness be derived programmatically. 😉

More Support Type options: Don’t see how this would really help plugin or theme developers really. Not unless there were associated filters.

Flag POST as spam: Don’t see that this would cause any harm but not sure how it would differ from the modlook tag? It would be just one more feed tag we’d have to watch.

The flag post as spam would let us know which post, exactly, was the problem (and thus I don’t get an RSS feed of 70 posts when a spammer hits up an old, long, thread). Also what if that emailed the wp-forums list? “Esmi has flag this post as spam: ##LINK##”

+1 for one click to delete all posts and ban the account
+1 click username and see all posts of the user in the backend of bbPress
+1 better profiles (I would like to keep rss feeds from users activities on forum)
+1 status, add tag and move topic with one button click or remove/add tag without page refreshing.
+1 batch move and delete
+1 manage actions should stay at right, close to add tag, status
+1 can add replies to fixed topics no matter how old they are, at least to the fixed ones (because they keep read me first, notes etc)
+1 can change permalinks

The only problem with that is some of the theme and plugin developers are the problem. That is, they’re the reason we really need moderators, and I would not like to see them as forum wide mods. That would give them too much power, and too many act like children. Limited to just their own theme/plugin area mitigates the damage. I’ve see too many ticked off emails where people flip out that they got a bad review to ever be comfortable with that idea.

I don’t think plugin/theme authors should have forum wide modding privileges either, that would indeed be awful. Just for their own forums.

There’s already a check that recognizes the plugin/theme author in the specific forums, you’ll see next the username “Plugin Author” or “Theme Author”. If that same check could also give the user at least somewhat higher privileges that would be awesome.

Now, that I think about it, it’s not really a suggestion anyways because if we’re going to get improved tools, those would obviously not be available to just everyone anyways, correct?

Also, you bring up another excellent point to why a Support URI would be helpful. If authors intended on supporting their own users/customers then that would become obvious with those authors that are using the Support URI and general forum mods could focus just on the other .org forums instead.

Here’s the ultimate issue:

1. I would like to support my users/customers on my official forum (I don’t I’m even close to being alone on this one).

2. If I can’t do just that and also need to try and keep up with odds and ends that end up in the .org forums, then I at least need the control and not other mods.

While the idea on paper sounds great, general forum mods helping out on ALL .org topics wherever they’re found this actually becomes problematic if they’re closing topics, giving directions or answers to my users/customers that I don’t feel is the best quality or best interest of my users/customers.

I include customers in the equation because I really have had customers show up asking questions in the .org forums because of this fragmentation.

Before someone brings it up, of course closing our official forums and directing all customers to one unified forum on .org is not the answer. I’m sure most authors have had fully established websites, blogs and forums well before submitting to .org.

Plugin/theme authors contribute plugins and themes to the WordPress community abiding to the GPL and other requirements, end of obligation. Let’s not split hairs here, the 23,152 plugins in the plugin repo and the 1,667 themes in the theme repo have a huge impact on the success of WP overall.

Like Chip brought up, there’s no requirement for authors to provide support on .org itself. That doesn’t mean that we just don’t care, but many of us already have official forums where we have full control and all the tools we’ll ever need.

Frankly, I don’t think all the tools in the world are going to solve these problems (certainly not the redundant forum issue), that a basic freedom like a Support URI would solve.

But, I digress… if we HAVE to put up with the auto-creation of plugin/theme forums every time we want to submit something, it’s an absolute must that we be able to freely close, open, sticky, edit or delete topics/replies in our own forums. Before someone jumps all over the “we don’t delete” policy I mean in the rare event of spam, or personal attacks or duplicate topics by the same users getting in etc.

it’s an absolute must that we be able to freely close, open, sticky, edit or delete topics/replies in our own forums

Stickies, maybe. Edit/delete/open/close: absolutely not.

It’s not that I don’t trust you, it’s that I don’t trust anybody. Not really. Too many theme authors would simply abuse such power and delete any questions they didn’t like or remove any bad reviews they got, etc. Same goes for plugin authors.

You don’t have to support your plugin/theme on .org if you don’t want to. But you deal with the results of that.

Part of having your code hosted by .org means that people are going to come here and ask questions about it, whether we make those forums more visible or not. People were asking questions about your code in our support forums before we made that support tab on your theme/plugin page. Now you have the opportunity to see those questions more easily. Telling us to hide them again in favor of giving you additional offsite linkage isn’t solving the problem, which is that your users are not getting the help they need.

I think there are points for both sides, but much stronger points for the Support URI for an overall best well-rounded solution.

The rebuttal against the Support URI/official support forums situation is ironically the same argument for those of us that have good intentions at heart that want a Support URI.

Let me try and show you my side of what should get priority (being a bit extreme to paint a very clear picture). WordPress, who cares. Me/my company, who cares. We’re ONLY talking about what is ABSOLUTELY BEST for the user and NOTHING ELSE.

Yes, many users will end up back on .org looking for help, BECAUSE THEY DON’T KNOW ANY BETTER. They’ll ask for help and it might be tumbleweeds in the forum. I see so many theme/plugin authors ignore their duplicate .org forums because they have their official forum already.

Now, I’m not one of those people. I’ve signed up for 3rd party RSS feed to email notifications so I can get alerts instead of manually checking everyday on .org. This has worked okay. And I’ve tried educating people to use the official forum where I have much better tools and means to help them including the exchange of sensitive info.

I can sticky topics and make sure they get their eyes on documentation, known issues and other important updates. In the .org forums I’ve made important notes about how to seek official support and that will get buried eventually even though we all know people don’t read the fine print anyways.

So, for those of us that actually have official support forums and even our own knowledgeable communities dedicated to specific themes and plugins with the creators/developers right there ready to help with all the tools they could ever need, THAT IS the very best place for users to get help, hands-down.

So, putting aside WordPress’ interests, putting aside author’s interests and let’s not even remove, obfuscate or redirect the auto-generated forums or the “View support forum” button, but why not create a Support URI option that will place, in addition, above that “View support forum” button, perhaps as an orange button, “Official support available” (or something to that effect) that links to the official forum?

There is absolutely no downside to that, in fact in only manages to inform the users and give them more options and make them aware, especially for those that ask questions in ghost town forums, never get an answer and never even knew there was somewhere better they could ask for help. This is about user-friendliness and ease of use and nothing else after all, right?

If people get their software from WordPress.org and get the plugins from WordPress.org and see the forums on WordPress.org, then saying that they should have gone to your other site for support isn’t them “not knowing any better”.

If you want to put all the support and community and information on your own site, then you should put the primary location for the theme/plugin downloads from there too, for consistency. Otherwise, you’re the one confusing your users by having the plugin available somewhere where you do not also support it.

Of course I’m not saying people should just magically know there is an official forum for them to use, that’s the point. Naturally, they will return to .org for support. That makes sense, no one is arguing that. And at this point I don’t think anyone is talking about eliminating plugin/theme forums or redirecting them anymore (though that was basically Emil’s initial idea which started this ultimate discussion).

All that we’re saying now (yes we, the majority of authors I’m sure have official forums for their software where they can provide endlessly better support) is how about adding a feature that informs them that there is actually an official forum specifically for the theme/plugin they’re using where they can get the best and quickest support?

And that is the question that Chip has posed, are we moving towards a place in which just to contribute something to .org we also have to provide support there too, mandatory?

That’s what it feels like you’re saying without really saying it and it just doesn’t feel like the right move. I mean there are only about 2k themes in there as it is (that’s really not very many for the years that have gone by). I agree with Chip that this would seriously put a brake on the frequency of theme submissions to the free repo, which are pretty low as it is.

The thing is most authors did host their own software and forums ALREADY, well before ever submitting something to .org. And a lot of that stuff wasn’t even GPL. They made the effort to GPL it and get it ready to submit to .org. Why? To share their works with as many people as possible, making it easier for users to find what they need.

I don’t think everyone who submits to .org even realizes that a forum will be auto-created for it. And I doubt there were any who ever had the mindset that once they submitted to .org they were going to shut down their official forums and redirect people to .org. Official forums were always there first.

The theme/plugin forums on .org really only serve a purpose to pick up slack for authors who are either negligent, never intended on providing support in the first place, officially or otherwise or I’m sure the rare occasion where they don’t even have their own website so that is the only place for them to use to support their users.

The specific auto-created forums for plugins/themes will never be the dominant place for support because they usually come after, which naturally makes them redundant in many cases. This really isn’t a subjective opinion. This is just a basic fact. Look at the most popular themes, then checkout their website where they all have thriving communities with forums, documentation where more times than not there are even paid employees there answering questions every single day, maybe even in shifts and doing so professionally, let alone all the extra features and archived topics for them to look through to find their answers. The official forum will always be the best place for a user to get support.

To even suggest anything along the lines of “Well, don’t contribute themes/plugins here unless you’re also going to use the forums here to support them.” (paraphrasing) isn’t good for users (not sure who that’s good for?).

The moment of possible confusion where a user realizes “Oh hey, this isn’t the official place to ask for support?” (and learning there is somewhere better) is infinitely better than putting a new filter/rule in place that will slow the progress of new themes and plugins being added in one searchable place or the ability to find them directly through their WP admins.

An author contributes a plugin/theme to .org where it is reviewed and filtered to the specification demanded by WP. End of obligation. They’ll gain more recognition for their works and WP just got stronger as a more popular CMS platform that offers thousands of plugins and themes. It’s a fair trade already.

Of course we all hope that authors will take care of the users that use their stuff and that they’ll keep their works up-to-date and working for users and WP. This isn’t a debate about whether to support users or not, it’s about the best way. Since you’ve made it clear that authors will never have mod rights for managing their own forums on .org, then that’s just one more reason that official forums are the best place for specific theme/plugin support, though that never changed anyways. That’s always been the case.

Just take a look at the most used themes, then compare the official forums with the .org forums and ask yourself where you think the average user would prefer to ask for help, given the option. Try this out as an experiment. I can almost guarantee when looking at the data you’ll see a lot of clicks on the “Official support available” button and authors will see an increase in more questions on their forums and less straggler questions on .org that go missed altogether sometimes. Better organization and response time for users and authors, win win.

It seems pretty black and white what would be best for users. But, we’re only talking about the compromise of informing them and giving them the option. I say this as politely as I can, it kind of seems like you have tunnel vision over .org when WordPress, its users and the many developers by a great length transcend the actual wordpress.org website. If we’re not discussing simply what’s best for users regardless, what exactly are we discussing? Perhaps I am indeed misunderstanding something.

So, it’s already being done, yet in a less user-friendly way than even I’m suggesting at this point. This needs improvement. Then, everyone needs fair and equal access to this same feature.

Does that not sound fair? Is this not something you’re willing to explore? If it’s a simple no, well, then there isn’t anything more to discuss. But, it still doesn’t answer the valid points people have been making.

Except, the vast majority now get WordPress via one-click installer from their host, and they get Themes and Plugins from their own WordPress install’s WP-Admin dashboard. So, I’m not sure that the underlying assumption here is still valid.

(p.s. “Notify me of follow-up comments by email” still isn’t working, network-wide for all the Make sites, as far as I can tell.)

Plugin and theme authors can add details of any 3rd party support forums to their readme.txt file and Theme Description if they want to point users in a specific direction. I also add links the the Help tab in my theme’s options pages and in plain text on the same page. As result, about 75% of my users go to my own forum. But I still think that anyone hosting an add-on on wordpress.org should offer some forum of support there too. Even if it only to point people to the right places. Forum regulars will happily do this too if you let us know where to point people to.

There are a lot of differences between the theme and plugin sides, so yes… it’s a bit difficult to talk about them both in the same general subject.

My suggestions (as well as others) are that we need more control if we’re going to embrace on .org support (should we or users be left with no other options), there really is no other bell or whistle that will replace that, but we’ve hit a brick wall on that subject.

Anyways, I’ve definitely exhausted all the points I wanted to make on this subject, nothing further to add.

If you saw the volume of, well, whining brat emails we get over ath plugins for people who are pissed off that (a) someone didn’t like their plugin and left a bad comment and (b) they responded with insults and vitriol which (c) make them look bad…. Well.

The only way around that would be to limit the plugin/theme devs to people who aren’t going to have stupid days and act like over-entitled children. That just won’t fly. We’re trying to let anyone in who wants. So while we want to be welcoming, people have proven we can’t do things like just accept any code without review, and also that the majority aren’t mature enough to handle that responsibility. If you ARE and you’re active, you may get mod’d anyway just because we like that

But. You don’t have to support your code in the forums! I have always said that, unless other wise DOCUMENTED, however, users have a reasonable expectation that they’ll get support here. So how do you get around it?

1) Put it in your readme. At the top so it’s the first thing a plugin sees. “This plugin is supported at…”
2) Have it in your FAQ
3) Put it in your plugin’s admin page if you have one.
4) DO follow the forums, and reply with ‘I offer minimal free support on the forums…’ (for things like “How do I activate it…” when your answer is “Put in your API key. If you need more help…”).
5) Be honest and firm, without being mean.

Is this more work? Yes! But in return, you don’t have to handle hosting or distribution or server security 😀

Even if you’re not hosted here, you’ll still get asked questions here (see StudioPress, or every single webhost), so yes, you end up spending time keeping tabs on it.

In my opinion, if they want to provide support on their own site, then they should host their theme there as well.

You’ll find Theme developers coming to comment here under the assumption that the WordPress project is expecting them to provide support for their Themes via the WPORG forums, based on the outcome of the Support URI thread over at Make/Themes.

So, are we sending mixed signals to Theme/Plugin developers?

1) Put it in your readme. At the top so it’s the first thing a plugin sees. “This plugin is supported at…”
2) Have it in your FAQ
3) Put it in your plugin’s admin page if you have one.
4) DO follow the forums, and reply with ‘I offer minimal free support on the forums…’ (for things like “How do I activate it…” when your answer is “Put in your API key. If you need more help…”).
5) Be honest and firm, without being mean.

So, if all of these means are acceptable, why the resistance to a Support URI as the canonical means by which a Theme/Plugin developer declares their support medium?

The end result of this dichotomy is that we are essentially telling developers: sure, you can support your code on your own site, but we’re intentionally going to make it difficult for you to do so.

You don’t have to support your plugin/theme on .org if you don’t want to. But you deal with the results of that.

Otto said that too.

It’s not that you hate to, it’s that you’re expected to. And if you don’t, you accept the consequences of these missed expectations.

Everything I described would, I think, mitigate them.

We’re saying this “You don’t have to support your code here. People will expect you to, however, especially if your code is hosted here, so you should have a sensible plan of action if you chose not to, and accept that not everyone will be happy with it, no matter what you do. Not that they would be anyway.”

Talking about general forums, not specific plugin/themes, something i’d love to see is some kind of sorting for “popular” questions/answers. IMO, one of the biggest problems we face on answering questions is the amount of repeated exact-matches on the same topic.

Repeatedly answering the same questions takes out some of the joy/energy of crafting better answers for the unique ones. And the current search mechanism is somewhat inefficient when looking for quality answers.

If we could somehow highlight best answers, maybe per topic, as some sort of collaborative FAQ, we’d be able to focus more on unique questions.

As I imagine it, this process could be semi-automated by auto-selecting the most-viewed Q/As and letting forum MODs select which ones get fixed to this “special” section (the FAQ), where we could direct OPs. This, combined with a new status type, say, “Redirected to FAQ”, could clear up the queue quite a bit.

I half like that… The problem is that (at least on the forums here) people don’t have the exact same problem a lot of the time. Similar, but not the same. Mind you, I also don’t use predefined replies most of the time, since I like to read what the person said, and how, and reply in their language as best I can.

I’d rather have a ‘Codex Answer’ so we can like to not another post, but an ‘official’ answer, and they can easily reply “Tried that, got this…”

A Codex Answer seems to be a good fit, I think. Makes me wonder if we’ll be able to find enough hands to do that on localized forums – which brings me to the problem of not having enough active moderators, who could solve things by closing and pointing duplicates like in WPSE.

At the same time, closing the question just doesn’t solve the problem on WP forums, because it only makes sense if finding good anwsers (not just any answer) to the same problem is a no-brainer.

Thinking about how the forum search works, it occurs to me that maybe we could try something different, by improving good anwsers based on raw SEO:

This is not completely related, but on the plugin review screen, I’d love a drop down that would allow the user to select the plugin version (or default to the latest release) in addition to the WP version. That would give some potential context to negative points in some reviews where those issues may have been addressed in later releases.

+1 for Warnings
+1 for implementing some sort of method to better manage duplicate posts
+1 for higher privileges for plugin developer on their OWN plugin forum

+ 1 for Plugin Versions….
My biggest frustration is users who don’t do basic troubleshooting and/or who don’t provide basic information that I need in order to provide good support.

I find myself constantly asking users to post a link to the affected page, post what version of the plugin they are using, and do basic troubleshooting steps (like deactivating other plugins) before I can help them… and this takes a great deal of time!

Obviously we can’t force people to isolate the error themselves as many don’t have the knowledge to do so, but we could encourage users to select plugin version, WP version, and field for ‘Affected URL’?

…while we’re at it, maybe a checkbox ‘yes i checked the FAQs and looked for existing posts on this topic’?

Reply-by-email: It could be useful.More obvious subscription tools: I like the existing Subscription link, but I noticed that it doesn’t appear until somebody posted in your support forums for the first time. That means that I cannot actually subscribe to the support posts for my plugin right after releasing it. I have to wait until someone starts the first thread.Plugin Version: I like the idea.30-second Throttle: that would be nice. It can be annoying at times!

I would also add:Merge threads: mods can do it I guess, but I feel like it would be nice if plugin authors could do the same in their own forums.

Moving threads from the general Plugins forum to our own dedicated forums: would it be possible to automatically move a thread into dedicated plugin forums when that thread is tagged with the plugin name?

I’ve been thinking about the “Warnings” idea and I’ve got another suggestion. What about having positive(+) flagging on topics posted to theme & plugin forums? That way, users could “rewards” devs for good support. I have to say that I get a little tired of many theme authors apparently not supporting their themes whilst those that do usually offer sterling support. I know that people can assess support levels over the past 2 months via a theme or plugin’s page but it would be nice to see something in the forums as well.

In many (if not most) cases, “Support” appears to be a misleading title for that tab. The first time people see it, they get overexcited and expect that there is always someone there waiting to help them build the website of their dreams. 24×7. For free.

I enjoyed providing free support, reading feedback, and all this communication, but only for the first couple of months. I won’t go into much details and examples – I think most developers know what it’s like to deal with demanding and abusive users. So I decided to invest more time in writing more detailed (free) documentation, and placing a paywall between me and the users who need individual help in addition to that. This is a way to “filter” them, so I have to deal only with those who value my work and my time.

This is why I don’t provide the expected “support” for my themes here. Not because selling support for my free themes is a major revenue stream for me – it’s not. Very rarely someone would want to pay only to get support for a free product. And I’m sure I’d get way more people interested in my other products if I did provide free support here. I don’t do it because it simply isn’t enjoyable experience 40+% of the time.

Now, some (hopefully) constructive suggestions:

1) A “FAQ” page for themes would be great. Just like the way it’s for plugins. This may not be the case for other authors, but I’d love to post additional info there and reduce the need for “support” in the nearby tab .

2) The theme “Reviews/Rating” section might need some attention from moderators. Example: a theme user (quite a few actually) rates my theme as low as he can (1) with the sole purpose to “punish” me somehow because I haven’t delivered the support he expected. But he happily continues to use my theme, so he/she actually thinks it’s awesome. The low rating isn’t helpful for other users though. So would you not agree that badly argumented reviews that lack any sense should be moderated?

3) A separate “You SUCK!” button would be a great alternative for all who want to express their anger, indeed .

4) As a theme author, I don’t want moderator privileges. I admit that I’m not mature enough for this job. So I, just like the rest of the community, rely on the moderators and their judgement.

5) If you want me to spend more time interacting with my users, I’d need some guides, tutorials, and psychology consultations on “How to deal with annoying individuals in a calm and mature manner”. I’ve watched some of Ipstenu’s videos, but more is needed I think .

Is there a better term than ‘support’? Forums seems too… meh. And believe me, the regular mods know just what you mean about abusive, entitled, harassing, annoying, users 😉 Which is why I wanted to ask people how we could make it more enjoyable for you (filter out the bad people etc) and the users (get them where they need to be without fighting).

2) Tag them modlook (or maybe we should have modreview so we know that’s it? Hrm. I hate ‘more’ tags). I do want a button so you can flag a review as suspect. Right now the only person who seems to be able to sort when it’s someone having a legit gripe vs a troll is @otto42 :/ Legit unhappy reviews should stay, though, IMO. Trolls/abusive/scummy ones should not.

3) *ponder* That seems wonderful and dangerous.

4) Are there extra powers you would like? No shame in not wanting mod-powers, lots of people who are forum regulars don’t either! Not having them is a lot more freeing that having to be ‘good’ all the time 😉

Consider Amazon’s review style, where reviews can be marked as helpful/not-helpful by others. Might be an idea. Or something similar. Best to think along lines of community-sourcing information like that.

But at present, there’s not enough reviews to make this a general-issue. Quantity first. Then we can deal with quality.

The best way to respond to a bad review is with useful information. Remember, you’re not necessarily replying to the review itself, but also to other people who will read the review later. A moderate and thoughtful reply goes a long way.

a theme user (quite a few actually) rates my theme as low as he can (1) with the sole purpose to “punish” me somehow because I haven’t delivered the support he expected.

They do that for plugins too. Even when you have provided free support. Bottom line: there’s just no pleasing some people.

But realistically, I don’t see how mods could sort these out. I think the best things you can do is respond to the critical review pointing out exactly what you’ve said here — that they’re still using your theme so you can only assume that they are still happy with it.

One thing that I miss is the automatic tagging of posts in a plugin’s support forum with that plugin’s tag. When you have an issue with plugin interoperability people will often tag a post with both tags. I really like this, but to see all my plugins forum posts I need to look at the tag, and the support forum. It would be nice if the tag grabbed the superset.

+1 for getting rid of the 30 second throttle, at least in my own plugin forum. After I release an update I usually reply to 5-10 threads letting people know that a feature they requested was added, a bug they reported was fixed, etc. I always get slowed down by the throttle, though.

+1 for more support type options, too. Literally 90% of threads in my plugin’s forum are requests for new features, or people asking “how can I make it do *this*” (where *this* isn’t something the plugin was intended to do).

Following my discussion earlier this week with Jen and to clarify what was mentioned in her post, I’ve been thinking of ideas for what a “Troubleshooting WordPress Workshop” could look like.

Two years ago at WordCamp Toronto, Kathryn Presner led a 3 hour workshop and gave beginners a primer about WordPress walking them through the dashboard, etc… Myself and Ruth Maude were on hand to help people with questions.

Perhaps 3 hours is too long for a troubleshooting workshop, but having a longer session would be useful for folks to ask question, play with code, etc…

A very rough outline of what could be covered would be:

Installation Issues ( localhost and self hosting )

I can’t find/reset my password what do I do?

Overview of FTP and phpMyAdmin – why these are great troubleshooting tools

Ack! White screen of death

Theme/Plugin errors

Incompatibility with themes/plugin

Media Images are not showing up, how can I fix this?

I’ve upgraded my site and now it’s borked

My site is slow

I’m making changes and nothing happens

I change the site url and now I can login to my admin

Help me change the width/colour/font???? How do I do this?

These are just off the top of my head right now. Before doing anything, I would want to go through the troubleshooting info on the codex, but having been on the forums for a while, I’ve answered a combination of these questions, once or twice. 😛

I would also like to give the participants the opportunity to submit their specific issues before they come. Hopefully once they’ve been through this, they would be more comfortable coming to the forum and offering help.

I agree with localhost install. In Toronto, there was a workshop prior to Kathryn’s led by someone who’s name I forget now and he led the group through the localhost install and then Kathryn did her workshop and there were some interesting issues specially with folks on PCs. 😛

This workshop would be ideal for folks who already have an install either on a server or localhost, but new beginners could join of course and just listen.

Full day might be a bit draining for both student and teacher though. I do a lot of teaching and three hours is pretty intense. The other thing to consider is the room allocation. I’ve never planned a WordCamp, but I’m guessing getting a venue (after sponsors) is the toughest part.

Anyhow, I’m sure that we can come up with a curriculum and then do as see fit.

I forgot to mention in the post above too, that we also need to leave time to work on issues that participants have and thus if we did 3 hours, had lunch, then came back, did an hour and then it’s questions/individual troubleshooting time. That could be a potential scenario.

Full-day workshops are pretty standard (with breaks throughout), as is having multiple teachers. Getting a venue for 350 people is hard, but getting a venue for 30-50 for one day isn’t usually a big deal. A training that is just 3 hours could be done in a regular meetup, and isn’t really the intensive level-up special event I was thinking of. There’s room and a need for both, but once we start thinking about people making travel plans to attend or teach at one of these, it really isn’t worth the expense for 3 hours.

Really looking forward to seeing how this develops – terrific idea. Would love to be part of it somehow.

I would also like to give the participants the opportunity to submit their specific issues before they come.

Very good idea.

In terms of localhost installs – one idea to consider could be what I believe the Ladies Learning Code folks ended up doing for their WordPress workshops; they give folks instructions on setting up localhost installbefore the workshop happens, and make sure that everyone is set up ahead of time so no time is spent on getting that up and running during the actual workshop. Plus there’s no relying on Wifi, which so often can’t handle that many people at once.

I would suggest including Backup and Restore practice (especially Restore) as part of the training. Even though many users have a backup strategy, most have probably never tested it or don’t test it often enough.

Welcome Training to Support

At the community summit, we went a little bit team-creating-crazy. As such, we splintered people into groups (like docs out of support) rather than splintering into projects within larger teams. For Support, this meant that electing team reps was especially hard, since the people getting votes were repping other teams.

One of these new teams, Training, started with excitement but then petered out with no activity for a couple of months. The solution to these two issues seemed pretty clear: merge Training back into Support, and have Christine Rondeau serve as the 2nd team rep. @ipstenu was in favor, so there we go. Welcome Christine back to the fold!

Christine will be working closely with the Community Outreach group, and we’re starting to plan our first training project already. It’l be focused on Troubleshooting WordPress, aimed at leveling up people to the point that they can do more with WP professionally, and could be more confident contributing to forums. She’ll undoubtedly be asking you all for ideas and help. Note: in line with the diversity initiatives, we’re going to do this first workshop for women, a la railsbridge. It’ll also get posted online for all and sundry.

Contributor Drive

I’ve been scouring every open source project’s community sites to see how they approach things, and one had a great concept that I want us to steal modify, use, and redistribute. The idea was this:

Weekend Project: Become a Contributor

We’ve done things like this at WordCamps (usually on dev day, and mostly focused on contributing to core), but what I was thinking of for support was something not too intensive: 20 Questions.

20 Questions Proposal:

Publicize the weekend project to become an official wp forums contributor, called 20 Questions.

People can sign up to be part of the weekend contributor drive. Current volunteers (approved as knowing their stuff) will be the mentors.

Their goal is to answer 20 questions successfully (mentor says yes, good answer) during the weekend before the cutoff time.

Keep at least 1 support person in IRC channel for team at all times during the weekend (make schedule in advance).

At cutoff, tally the results! People who got at least 20 right are officially congratulated and welcomed as support contributors. We can make a graphic they can put in their sidebars or something maybe. People who didn’t make it are thanked for their efforts, and pointed to resources to help them level up. The person with the most questions answered gets a prize. The person who answered the hardest question gets a prize (so they aren’t incentivized to just do easy ones). We can do wp swag and/or WC tix for prizes.

Hi Jane, I love the idea. I think the 20 questions would give someone like me the opportunity to know for sure whether my knowledge level is up to par (and the confidence to jump into forums). I also like offering resources to give people pointed feedback for increasing knowledge. +1

Just wanted to say how much I love both the Contributor Drive and Troubleshooting WordPress for Women ideas. I’ll be away the weekend of Feb. 15 but will be glad to publicize the drive in the Montreal & Ottawa WP community groups, no matter when it ends up happening.

I\’d like to get involved. I realize I\’m not a known quantity. I don\’t know if I\’m even close to being knowledgeable enough. I really like security & troubleshooting aspects of wordpress. I host WP sites, help folks set them up, troubleshoot various aspects, etc. I\’m also sight-impaired so interested in accessibility as well. I\’m also a lady, so working w/other ladies would be really cool!

Open to everyone If you’re interested in helping make support a better place for everyone, and finding better ways to help folks, we’d love to have you. (If you’re looking to get help, #wordpress is open for that 24/7)

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